Editorial: Filling the void in leadership

There was a certain symmetry in Bill Ford Jr.'s call for a national summit to see whether business executives, academics and others who care can reinvent this country out of its aimless economic drifting.

It was his great-grandfather, after all, who practically invented modern industry for the globe. And it's the company that bears his name that lost $8.7 billion in the second quarter of this year trying to make cars in North America.

It is a good thing he and Dow Chemical Co. Chairman Andrew Liveris are doing some leading.

The politicians and bureaucrats running our government sure don't seem to have a clue.

The summit, which the two Michigan corporate titans announced recently at a Detroit Economic Club session, takes place at Ford Field from Monday, June 15, through Wednesday, June 17. Let's all hope they have better luck there than the Lions.

It's about time someone demanded that Congress and the White House move beyond crippling partisanship. We need serious plans for energy independence and for reversing this country's lamentable leaking of its capacity to manufacture things the world's people want to buy.

We're in the midst of a seismic transfer of wealth from our shores to just about everybody else's. No one is doing much about it, and that will rank high in history's list of our great scandals.

Liveris points out, correctly, that it's time for a moonshot-like full-court press to find alternatives to sending so much of our money to oil sheiks.

Mid-Michigan is doing its part, by the way. Dow Corning Corp., Dow and Evergreen Solar Inc. of Marlboro, Mass., are investing billions in sun-energy products.

Consumers Power Co. and LS Power Group of East Brunswick, N.J., plan to spend in our backyard $4 billion on "clean" technology to squeeze electricity out of the 200 years worth of coal waiting under our population's feet.

And it just doesn't make sense that so many of us seem resigned to giving up manufacturing to offshore entrepreneurs. These are smart people who take our ideas and make their workers prosperous building them.

The Dow chairman blames our corporate tax structure. Our rates are the second highest in the world at a time, he points out, nine other industrial nations have reduced theirs to draw more capital, growth and high-paying jobs for their people.

Liveris complains, too, that regulation smothers industry with costs a third higher than our off-shore competitors.

These are big business issues that have serious little guy implications. If you don't believe it, ask some of our neighbors.

Between 1995 and 2005, the United States lost 3 million manufacturing jobs -- 218,000 of them in Michigan.

Somebody has to do something about this.

Maybe 5,000 business and academic leaders -- Liveris and Ford also plan to invite the new president and his cabinet -- creating "must do" lists at a football field can gain more yardage for us than the government partisans that pack the marble buildings in Washington, D.C.